I Was Fire, She Was Water
by Serenity's Ghost
Summary: "Mai was away with her family on vacation and the Avatar and his friends  although maybe I should have said our friends, I think we were all friends now  had come to visit me." Zuko really gets a look at Katara. Zuko/Katara...sort of.


**Bitten by the random bug and wrote this. Enjoy.**

**Standard Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar: The Last Airbender. Duh.**

It was torturous. Mai was away with her family on vacation and the Avatar and his friends (although maybe I should have said our friends, I think we were all friends now) had come to visit me. They were all staying not too far from the palace despite my attempts to have them housed here during their stay. They declined, instead opting for more regular accommodation. I supposed when you're not used to it, you're just not used to it. I couldn't really blame them. It could have been more than just a little awkward for them.

While Mai was away and they were here, they always found some little, trivial thing to pull me away from my duties as the Fire Lord. I spent a lot of time around them and they were just as much light-hearted kids as always despite having been through wars and back. I kind of envied them their almost nonchalance and free-spiritedness.

The most mature of them by far was Katara. There was just something about the tanned waterbender that exuded an essence of maturity above them. Now that we had some time to relax and we weren't enemies and were in fact friends, I was actually able to appreciate her and the rest of them. I was able to realise for the first time that she was actually very beautiful. All those jokes people had made before about her being my girlfriend no longer seemed quite so revolting. The man who was able to call her his was truly lucky.

Not that she was the type of girl to appreciate the thought of being considered a man's property. Rather, that would make her throw a fit. Just picturing the indignant rant she would go on after hearing someone stake their claims on her made me want to laugh. Why did I enjoy seeing her riled up like that? Well, when I was not the target of her screams and shouts.

I had recently or not-too-recently discovered that I had a thing for pretty girls with fight. Mai and Katara both seemed to fill the profile. Only, Katara had something a lot more appealing that Mai lacked. She had a wider range of emotions, by far and she was...more open than Mai had initially been or still somewhat was. Mai being a girl of few emotions didn't bother me nor did her preferred conservative nature. I cared for her a lot which was the main reason why we had made up and broken up so many times. But in the few days that she had been here after so long, those few days that I had been made to spend with her and her friends, it stirred in me something that was familiar and yet foreign in its intensity.

I had somehow developed a crush on this girl. It was foreign, so foreign. How was something like that supposed to work? I was fire, she was water. One couldn't get more opposite than that.

The thought occurred to me: should I let that stop me? If there was anything I learnt, it was that if you don't try, you'd never know, never find the true path meant for you. My attempt at being good was difficult but proved to be a far more beneficial and worthwhile path to follow. Working at something was half the excitement. It gave you something to provide that feeling of accomplishment.

I couldn't help but feeling like I was betraying Mai by even entertaining the semi-romantic thoughts about Katara. She had her fixation with the Avatar and I had Mai, my wonderful girlfriend who knew me and put up with me for so long. My infatuation had little chance of being returned. We were just friends.

I waved as they walked away again, ready to head back from wherever they came or to go somewhere else. We hadn't gotten to that conversation during the five days that they had been here. I watched as they walked away and committed that smile of hers to memory. It would be a while before I saw it again. I could afford to think about it while Mai wasn't here. When she returned from her vacation, the loneliness that had probably caused this whole infatuation would go away and the romantic view of her would dissipate.

Probably.

**It's literally the shortest fic I've ever written.**


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